


On the Identification of Weeds

by feroxargentea



Category: Master and Commander - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Podfic Available
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-18
Updated: 2011-05-18
Packaged: 2017-10-19 13:17:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/201268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feroxargentea/pseuds/feroxargentea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Takes place after <i>The Mauritius Command</i>, but supposing that that campaign went rather differently.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On the Identification of Weeds

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Characters belong to the late Patrick O’Brian  
> Author’s note: thanks and apologies to Luzula for using the name she suggested.  
> NB: a lovely podfic of this story, read by snowdrop_song, can be found here: http://www.audiofic.jinjurly.com/on-identification-of-weeds

He watched the crouching infant lean forward, further and still further, until it fell face-first onto the soft ground, bewildered but undaunted. He set it upright and considered its top-heavy swaying for another minute before laying it flat, whereupon it reached immediately for the nearest flower.

“No, my dear, not _Prunella_ , it does not make good eating. See here, _Ranunculus repens_ , look, George, look! I shall hold it under your chin. You like butter, I find. Of course you do, you shall like all oleaginous foodstuffs, grow immensely obese and suffer an apoplexy by the time you are four-and-twenty, as half your forefathers did. If you must eat weeds, child, try this innocent _Rumex acetosella_ , not the _Taraxacum_.”

From the state of the infant’s wrappings, a diuretic was the least needed of herbal remedies. He wondered how much longer Sophie’s errand would take her and whether the child would begin to pout and wail before her return, but his attention soon drifted back to the turf, recalling how proud Jack had been of the close-cut bowling green and how indignant when it had been pointed out to him that little of the lawn was actually grass; that even the narrow-bladed plants were mostly wood-rush, not Gramineae at all.

He lay down prone, as flat as the child, stretching out his arms to the turf, face pressed into it as if he might merge, dissolve, sink into it as a changeling returning to the sídhe. The straggly sward was full of worm-casts, cast upon cast, swallowing up the weaker seedlings in an infinitesimally slow tide of earth-mould. If he lay here, if he did not move, how long before he became soil? The processes of mankind’s decay were clear in his mind, but the timings obscure. How long before the worm-casts covered the mound itself and the marker that Bonden had carved?

He could not lie here, of course, however much his mind craved an oblivion more profound than laudanum could give. Sophie had set him to watch George, and she would find more tasks for him, more requests that he could not refuse, binding him with ruses as transparent as Sir Joseph’s urgent missions ‘for which there is no agent half so capable as you, my dear Maturin, nor so indispensable.’

And Jack was not here, of course. The mound, heaped though it was, contained nothing but scraps: his belt, an old pair of half-mittens, a lock of dulled hair, a parcel of scones buried by the twins in some strange pagan act of affection or propitiation. Sophie had not approved of any of it, but the girls had seemed comforted.

Too damaged and too far from home to be taken back, Jack had been buried at sea, between Mauritius and the Cape. A sentimental mind might have called the ocean Jack’s true home; a weak, overly-literal mind, the sort that might cling to symbols and keepsakes and memorials…

A wood-rush was tickling Stephen’s nose, the mundanity of the irritation recalling his thoughts to earth. A wood-rush with unusually fringed laminae, he realised as he sat up; hairier than _Luzula campestris_ , and reddened to its margins. A different species or subspecies, one adapted to the raised, disturbed soil of the makeshift grave? He toyed with the hypothetical _Luzula aubreii_ , running a finger down its whiskered leaves to examine the bristles.

There came a hail from the top of the lawn, where Sophie’s form, clad in the now-familiar widow’s weeds, appeared with the two small girls dancing around her skirts. They broke into a run when they saw him, Fanny shrieking and waving, Charlotte falling and picking herself up, still cradling whatever beetle or fungus she had brought to show him.

He raised his hand in acknowledgment, almost dropping the little wood-rush specimen as he did so. It should be _Luzula puella-fanatica_ , perhaps: better to honour the living than to moulder with the heedless dead. He picked up the baby and started off up the bowling green towards the family.

**Author's Note:**

> (For those interested, Prunella vulgaris is selfheal, Ranunculus repens is creeping buttercup, Rumex acetosella is sheep’s sorrel, Taraxacum officinale is dandelion, Luzula campestris is field wood-rush, and Luzula puella-fanatica would translate as “fangirl’s wood-rush”.)


End file.
